Wireless network providers are providing subscribers with many more and more complicated applications than ever. These applications can result in subscribers calling customer care centers when those applications do not function properly or do not function at all. The cause of these malfunctions can be misprovisioned handsets, core network DNS servers, radio access network (“RAN”) or core network elements managing session policies, out of date information in the hand set, or incompatibility between the hand set configuration and the new application. The incompatibility can arise because of old versions of operating systems or applications residing on the handsets or because the network is unaware of the capabilities of the particular handset.
Network Element Management Systems (“EMSes”) and network monitoring systems provide general standard specified messages (e.g., attachment failure) that do not describe the failure specifically enough to allow correction without trouble shooting by a customer care representative. Further, the error messages do not contain any correlation to complete subscriber identities, locations or physical/logical network elements.
Without specific information on the nature of the failure and correlation with subscriber and location information, it is impossible for the network to detect and correct these type failures on its own without intervention. If the network were able to collect specific information about network activity (access, core, IP transport, or application services) and were able to correlate that information to specific subscribers and locations, the network would be able to take action to correct those failure, and even to anticipate problems and react proactively to address those problems before a failure occurs.